Time and space is filled
without disapointment

One should always be concious
of ones space, and others.

Space to stretch
Space between your ears

Space, the constant to fill
Think to much to feel!

To bissy filling
Think thaough compair give take
feel?
Shair thaught felt!

Lest you be cranking up your angry commenting energies to attack the editor, let me clarify: this is a verbatim love letter to me written fifteen years ago by someone I hurt. And remembering it is painful.

The owner of the love letters I had found in my garage and then contacted via Facebook came to retrieve the letters! It was, for the most part, a strange but amicable exchange. However, when I handed him the open box of love letters written to him by hurt and loving girls, the tone palpably changed:

“I didn’t realize you were going to contact the girls too.”

It seemed that, all these years later, a sense of tragedy had settled around the love letters. The causes and justifications for past misleading or hurtful behaviour were lost and there remained only a sort of regret and pain. The feelings—shame? sympathy?—were strong enough to turn him off having his picture taken with the love letters. Being a dedicated blogger, I convinced him to let me take one with his head cut off. He gave me an awkward thanks and hurried off to either enshrine or burn those letters.

I didn’t have a chance to ask how he felt. But I wanted to know. So I decided give myself the Mr. Loveletter treatment: publish my own shameful love letter and try to find its author.

There are, as of this week, 200 million eyes on Facebook. The geographic and demographic breakdowns are such that, as a Canadian of a certain age, it’s a safe bet that most of the people I have known in my life are on there. As any Facebook user can attest, there is poison in the pleasure of the Facebook experience. Along with long lost friends—my best friend from when I was five!—come the people you hate—the girl who pushed me in a garbage can at a school dance (You know who you are, bitch!).

But what about emotionally damaging and painful relationships, that pre-Facebook, we bury in the past via distancing anecdotes and/or cathartic amnesia? Facebook had made it simple for me to tear open poor Mr. Loveletter’s emotional scars. Slowly but surely he, and all of us, are blurring and redrawing the lines of community responsibility, between public and private without fully realizing it. I’m sure that when he opened his Facebook account he didn’t consider that it would enable the publicizing of his emotional baggage. But it did. And this is just the beginning. Our behaviours—socially and vocationally—are now documented and accessible. If we don’t do it ourselves, others can and will. Through pictures, stories, links and more. It is all escalating and unavoidable.

The thing is, I don’t think this is a bad thing for us. It is very fraught, but I think that comes more from the radical social and cultural transitions taking place than from the wrongness or badness of it. We all must learn to be more aware and sensitive to our shifting social selves.

In my ideal world, social networks will make users more cautious with emotional engagements. There is no hiding now. If you burn someone they can find you and remind you. When you are getting to know someone you will know what you are getting into by doing a quick socialnet background check. I don’t really trust my peers if they have no online presence. What are they hiding? And if you think you hide bad behaviour behind fake identities think again. Informal networks already exist to warn people of users who pretend to be someone they are not. My fiancé warned me yesterday about a few Twitter and Identi.ca users who stalk women, and I blocked them. 

And what about those of us too old to not have skeletons in various closets that may crop up at any time? My experimental solution is to voluntarily throw the worst of them open in order to regain control of my own emotional tragedies and to defuse any future events.  Hence, the fifteen-year-old love letter. It was written by someone known as “Crazy Andrew” and I honestly don’t remember his last name even though we lived together a short time. I treated him just terribly and his love letter was an attempt to reach out to me in my preferred mode of communication. He was a stone carver and the written word was as clunky and awkward for him as a rock was in my hand. It was the very height of emotional goodness that he tried to reach me this way. He probably lives on the west coast and hates Facebook even as he uses it. 

So, towards my socialnet idealism, I embrace my tragedy publicly. If you think you know him pass this on: Sorry Andrew,  I hope that after you burned my passport and my Gloria Anzaldua books you moved on to a happy, love-filled life. Your love letter was buried in a box of books underneath a Yorkshire Terrier book but now it’s here in the bittersweet lights of the Internets.

Tags: emotional baggage, facebook, love letters, old boyfriend, relationships

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Posted on Wednesday, August 27th, 2008 at 12:39 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.